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Hardback in two volumes – 246 x 156 mm – 474 pages + 576 pages

Volume I: 1885–1906

Volume II: 1907–1925

Sixty illustrations in colour

ISBN 9781843682776

Listen to Eamon Duffy discuss Benson and The Benson Diary with A. N. Wilson

A. C. Benson (1862-1925), novelist, poet (he wrote 'Land of Hope and Glory'), educationalist and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, kept a voluminous diary for most of his life. Considered too controversial at the time, it was sealed up after his death. Only now, with the publication of this extensive selection, can his witty and acute judgements on people, institutions and issues – including Henry James, Thomas Hardy, Queen Victoria, Dean Inge, Balfour, Asquith, Eton and Cambridge – be fully appreciated. Benson paints an endlessly fascinating and often very funny picture of a public life at the heart of the Edwardian literary, educational, church and political establishments; but also of a private life riven by the pressures of unconsummated romantic attachments to young men, and by attacks of appalling depression, an illness then barely understood.

This edition has been prepared by the historians Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam and has a substantial introduction, extensive footnotes, a chronology, an index and 48 pages of photographs. It is presented as two elegant hardbacks.

In the Pepys Class
D. J. Taylor, The Times Literary Supplement

A. C. Benson enters the pantheon of great English diarists
Philip Hensher, The Spectator

There is no witness like him. … Long acknowledged by archival explorers to be a great diarist, A. C. Benson has now been placed in the position where the rest of us can read him and concur. Silly as he was, and remote from commanding anything like agreement at any point, he enters the diarists’ pantheon for readers to shake their heads over in perpetuity.
Piers Brendon, The Literary Review

There is rarely a page without some entertaining or piquant aperçu. As a portrait of an age, seen from a particular ivory tower, the diary is invaluable; as a study of someone in flight from his own nature, it is both moving and compelling.
Peter Parker, The Times

Some diarists are among the immortals – think Pepys and Alan Clark – and they’re the ones who give us the unforgettably acerbic, human take on their time. A. C. Benson, beautifully edited by Ronald Hyam and Eamon Duffy, is one of them. The author of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ has a range from the waspish to the Pooterish (bringing a glass of lemonade to Queen Victoria was an event). A joy.
Evening Standard

He rightly compares himself with Pepys, the pre-eminent diarist, but in some respects he is better than Pepys. … It’s hard to think how this edition, miraculously reduced from five million words to two volumes, could be bettered. We can see Benson as one of the great diarists, and what a gift that is.
Melanie McDonagh, The Tablet

What Benson values in a talker is ‘brevity, humour, suggestiveness, quickness’. All that is in his diaries, too.
Michael Wheeler, Church Times

The most beautifully produced books I’ve ever seen in my life, in modern times… They’re the sort of book if you have by your bed you read them over and over.
A. N. Wilson, discussing the Diary with Eamon Duffy